Hellboy Director Talks Games and the Halo Movie

"Very few games offer the possibility of being adapted to a movie."

While Guillermo del Toro fans await the release of next summer’s Pacific Rim, the director is busy working in the interactive realm. The avid gamer was taken by surprise when THQ’s financial troubles put his latest game, Insane, in peril. But like the vampires that inhabit his new Dark Horse comic The Strain, Insane lives on.

Del Toro, who produced DreamWorks' 3D spectacle Rise of the Guardians, talks about his love of games and reveals just how soon Insane will be available on consoles.

 

IGN: How have you seen video games evolve as an art form?

Guillermo del Toro: I’m 47, so I’ve seen video games evolve from tele-pong to now; literally, I’m that old. I think what it is, to me, when people say, “this video game is like a movie,” that’s not a big compliment. I think that what is great is when a video game is the best video game possible; when you are able to even go beyond any other art form and engage in storytelling through a video game engine.

IGN: How interested are you in exploring video games as an art form?

Guillermo del Toro: I spent a year and a half on Insane already, so I must be very interested. We’ve designed a world. We’ve designed the creatures. We’ve designed a lot of the sets. We laid out the whole story. We’re in good shape, but the reconfiguration of THQ took everybody by surprise, everybody.

IGN: So what’s the latest on Insane?

Guillermo del Toro: We were going to go to a lot of developers after THQ, but it seems like we’re going to be developing it after the first meeting we had. I can’t disclose where it was, but we went to a great developer on the first meeting and it seems that they’re picking it up because they love the package.

IGN: What does that mean for gamers in terms of how far away the game is from hitting store shelves?

Guillermo del Toro: We were two years away. The development span of a game like this is three years. We put a good year and a half into it and we have the universe quite figured out, but we are now going to take that and start doing all the leg work with coding it, creating the engine, and starting to test it. It’s going to take a good two years of modeling and rendering and creating the environments and all of that. The basic tenants of the game is that it’s created, but now we’re going to need to start actually making it.

IGN: When THQ first announced your relationship they said it was going to be a trilogy. Are you still thinking in those terms?

Guillermo del Toro: I think seeing the environments and what it is -- we are now very gladly free of the economic crisis. I think we’re going to concentrate on making it a great game and then we’ll see. Obviously, among the assets was that idea, so I think there’s a possibility. But we are not exploring it.

IGN: From a big picture perspective, what are the challenges of making a good video game movie?

Guillermo del Toro: I think there are very few games that offer the possibility of being adapted to a movie. I think video games are, in themselves, a great narrative experience. It’s kind of stubborn to think that they should be adapted to movies. I think that certainlyHalo would make a great movie, or a great series of movies, but it’s rare.

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I think that certainly Halo would make a great movie.

I think BioShock is really interesting, but it would need to be an R-rated movie to capture the atmosphere and action of the game and all of its different genres. It’s very hard for Hollywood execs to wrap their heads around something like that. They can only think in one genre or another most of the time. Video games are normally created by narrative geeks. We can transition from action and horror very smoothly, but the studio executives are much more linear.

IGN: Did you watch the Halo: Forward Unto Dawn web series?

Guillermo del Toro: I saw a couple of Webisodes, yeah.

A screenshot from Halo 4.

IGN: Based on that do you think that might get Hollywood interested in Halo again for the big screen?

Guillermo del Toro: I would hope so. One of the fortunate experiences I had around 2006 was that I actually adapted Halo with the writer D.B. Weiss before any other incarnation of the game and we were having a lot of fun with it.

IGN: One of your next big movies is Pacific Rim. What potential do you see that having in the video game space?

Guillermo del Toro: Very good. I think that we are starting with tablet games and stuff like that that will be downloadable. But I think that if the movie finds an audience, I would love to develop a long-term game that would take two or three years to develop, so I can do it right. I think you can do quick fighting games that are entertaining and good, but I think in order to create a universe you need at least two or three years of developing a game. It’s not a thing you want to hurry into.

Intrigue in LA Noire.

IGN: You’re known as a big gamer. How do you feel your gaming background and your game playing influences the ideas that you bring to the big screen?

Guillermo del Toro: I think that you can learn a lot from gaming. For example, sound design is really amazing in gaming and the fact that some of the set pieces in gaming are very much more bold and inventive and creative sometimes than movies because they are not restricted by budget or ratings. And now once you put "Mature" on a game, you can go really mature. It’s a looser threshold than an R rating, for example.

The shootout in LA Noire at the abandoned Intolerance Set is amazing. A couple of those cinematics in Left 4 Dead are amazing. The flood in the subway in Call of Duty: World at War is great. There are beautiful moments in many of those games that are just a purely great adrenaline rush you have at that moment.  Another moment that I think is a very interesting moral dilemma and incredibly hard is the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 episode at the airport, where you’re playing as the terrorist. It really was challenging morally, but also just simply an incredibly involving, emotional chapter of the game.

IGN: Speaking of Call of Duty, Black Ops II just shipped. What are you playing these days?

Guillermo del Toro: My daughter and I are going through Dishonored right now and enjoying the hell out of it. It’s really a great engine and really an interesting universe that combines a sort of future retro design with very good gameplay. I’m enjoying it quite a bit.

Dishonored.

IGN: That’s a single-player game, so how do you play with your daughter?

Guillermo del Toro: Yeah, but I’m either her wingman or she’s my wingman. When she gets too scared, she gives me the controller and says, “Kill those guys for me.” My two daughters and I play the BioShock games together and it’s single-player because it was too scary for them, but they love to watch me play it. And we’ll do the same with the new BioShock. They can’t wait for BioShock Infinite. They are waiting with baited breath, but I know I’m going to be playing and they’re going to be watching.

IGN: Is there a particular game that you’re really looking forward to this fall?

Guillermo del Toro: Well, I’m very loyal to Call of Duty and since I don’t play online, I only play the campaign. That’s the only thing I do. It usually takes me between three-quarters of a day. If I’m really, really good, I can go through it really quick, in less than a day. To me, it’s an event. I basically do not do anything that day. I save it for that weekend and I go Saturday and I pass a little bit of food and drink around to the folks and that’s it.